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Re: Publishers' view/reply to David Prosser

I will de-lurk for a moment and say that I found Joe Esposito's comments
concerning "unwashed" open access in the form of blogs interesting.  Dan
Chudnov has an interesting thought piece looking at some of the blurred
lines Joe refers to and Dan posits some ideas for applications that would
help manage a researcher's bibliographic process, including blogs
(http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/writings/blm.html).  Dan works at the
Yale Center for Medical Informatics and comes from a library background
(with some time put in on the MIT Dspace project).  It isn't hard to think
of the messy possibilities if libraries helped create tools to help merge
the "washed" and "unwashed" content.  I imagine there are other
ideas/examples of tools out there as well.

Whatever happens in publishing over the next few years, I can't believe
those raised on continuous high speed access, nearly ubiquitous computing,
electronic social networks, and a tradition of sharing and blogging will
settle into traditional and (nearly) monopolistic publishing cycles.  I
see it amongst my 20- and 30-something friends now.  Why lock up something
in a closed access journal article when you can have thousands read it
when you self-publish.  It is only those in more traditional tenure type
systems that worry about getting a good article into a higher impact
journal.  But even for those, it will not be long before the tools are
developed to add the necessary weight of peer-reviewed formality...

Damn, what a fun time to work in libraries :)  (not, of course, to say it
isn't a fun time to work in publishing ;-)

--matt

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Wilcox, Epidemiology & Public Health Librarian,
Director of Academic Technology
Yale School of Public Health
matthew.wilcox@yale.edu
voice: 203-785-5680 | fax: 203-785-4998
60 College St., Box 208034, New Haven, CT 06520-8034

***

On Mar 7, 2004, at 8:19 PM, Joseph J. Esposito wrote:
This is perhaps a matter of definition, but I would say that the author
demand for (at least some kinds of) open access is enormous and is indeed arguably the fastest-growing aspect of current Internet usage, with the possible exception of the new generation of social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, and the like), outstripping even voice-over-Internet Protocol.

The Weblog is a form--currently the PRIMARY form--of open-access
publishing. Many people think that for OA to "really" be OA, it has to
look like traditional (read: proprietary) publishing. Thus we have a
crop of OA practitioners that are going to great lengths to develop
parallel peer review systems, citations systems, and the like. To my mind this is like the early days of personal computing, when the Apple II was criticized for not being more like a mainframe.

Open Access is happening; it is just not happening in the way its most
respectable advocates imagine or hope for. There is something in the
emergent OA universe (with blogs as version 1.0) for everyone--or nothing for anyone, depending on how twisted one's perspective happens to me.

"Unwashed" OA (as distinct from such carefully articulated and respectable ventures as the Public Library of Science) is indeed available to anyone without restriction--and thus antipathetic to the interests of publishers; it is free--and thus antipathetic to the interests of librarians, who serve as gatekeepers with a checkbook to the world of proprietary publishing; and it is developed in a dialogue with a community--making it antipathetic to the interests of authors, who seek personal attribution for economic, psychological, and professional reasons (mostly psychological).

Whoever thought when Steve Wozniak stuck the first disk drive into the
Apple computer that we would someday be communicating on a vast, global
network of machines, each of us pecking away at our personal "client"?

From the pigpen,

Joe Esposito